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Google on Tuesday said it will keep cookies in their current form in its Chrome browser, and will walk back a previous commitment to build a simple opt-out tool for users who don’t wish to be tracked.
The digital ad ecosystem—which has invested significant resources and manpower to develop cookieless ways to track and target audiences and measure media performance—responded with a mix of shock, exasperation, and relief.
Google’s stock price, meanwhile, spiked about 3.8% on the back of the news.
Here are the winners and losers of Google’s cookie reversal, according to ad industry insiders and analysts.
The Winners
The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, and Yahoo
Organizations that use cookies but have also dedicated resources to develop alternative approaches, like cookieless ID solutions, are poised to capitalize on Google’s new stance.
Within that cohort, The Trade Desk may be particularly well-positioned thanks to its popular identifier, Unified ID 2.0, which has become a valuable tool for targeting audiences on the open web. CEO Jeff Green said on an investor call last year the ID has “reached a critical mass of adoption.” (Although the company has stumbled this year in the wake of subpar Q4 financials and its floundering media buying platform, Kokai).
Like The Trade Desk, LiveRamp stands to benefit thanks to its cookie-linked business and its efforts to develop a privacy-safe ID solution, RampID.
“They’re already in the cookie-matching space,” said Ameet Shah, partner and svp of publisher operations and strategy at Prohaska Consulting. “LiveRamp’s business is still very, very solid, and when you really think of their upside potential, it’s all the relationships they’ve made over the last several years … because they’ve looked at other ways to match and link data with marketers and bring in data collaboration.”
CEO Travis Clinger is bullish on LiveRamp’s future. “Marketers need to be everywhere their customers are, and measure how those touchpoints perform. Cookies can’t do that,” he told ADWEEK. A robust omnichannel strategy, he said, demands more, requiring both “first-party data and authenticated identity.”
LiveRamp’s stock has spiked over 7% since Google’s announcement Tuesday.
Other leading identity providers like Yahoo may also benefit from stronger data signals.
At this point, any adtech firm with a significant portion of its business linked to the open web may gain off the pivot, according to Ari Paparo, CEO of Marketecture Media. “They make high-margin, solid revenues on the back of the cookie,” he said. “And that revenue, in many cases, was assumed to be on its way out. It doesn’t seem to be anymore.”
PubMatic, Magnite, and larger SSPs
On the sell side, large supply-side platforms (SSPs) like PubMatic, Magnite, and Index Exchange will win, thanks to their efforts to integrate ID signals from publishers and their contextual insights.
“The advantage that some of these platforms have is that they work with publishers to receive better signal, and that continues to be a benefit” in the era of third-party cookies, according to Shah of Prohaska Consulting.
PubMatic, for its part, launched its identity management solution, Identity Hub, in 2020, allowing publishers to support various identifiers for every ad impression. Index Exchange and Magnite both offer similar solutions.
With cookies here to stay, these parts of the business are likely to flourish.
Plus, major SSPs are likely to maintain a strong position thanks to the value of the rich contextual signals at their disposal. Even with cookies still in the mix, SSPs have direct access to page-level content and real-time contextual data, which will remain valuable for brand safety, creative relevance, and targeting in cookie-free environments like Safari, Firefox, and mobile apps.
“Magnite sees this latest third-party cookie postponement as a welcome admission of the challenges with Privacy Sandbox proposals and a near term boon for the open web,” Garrett McGrath, svp of product management said in a statement shared with ADWEEK. Nonetheless, he said, the company will maintain a focus on “first-party signals and ensuring publishers and consumers retain control of addressability….”
Vox Media, Newsweek, and other cookie-reliant publishers
A variety of open web publishers may also be heaving a sigh of relief.
“The reprieve sustains revenue streams for publishers reliant on third-party cookies, particularly smaller outlets and journalism platforms,” said Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer at Ad Fontes Media, a media watchdog.
In particular, he points to outlets like Vox Media and Newsweek that have logged-in environments in which cookies enable them to supplement other data sets—information that ultimately helps them parse intent. And by some arguments, intent is more valuable than identity for advertisers.
“If I could only know one thing about you, I’d rather know that you’re in the market for a new product than who you are,” Paskalis said.
The Winners—with a caveat
Criteo, Audigent, and other big Privacy Sandbox investors
Leading open web adtech firms like Criteo are likely to see a bottom line benefit thanks to cookies’ resilience. Last year, Criteo’s CFO Sarah Glickman said the firm anticipated losses up to $40 million in the second half of 2024 as Google moved to sunset cookies. Now, with those plans nixed, Criteo blocks those potential losses.
On the other hand, Criteo and others are likely to incur costs for their steep investments in cookieless solutions developed through Google’s Privacy Sandbox, experts say.
Criteo has been perhaps the most public in its support of the effort; the company dedicated around 100 employees to testing Sandbox products, Marketing Brew reported last year.
“They invested a lot and they might think that this was a big waste of effort,” said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at media firm Raptive.
The company said it has “future-proofed” its approach to privacy-protected addressability, noting in a statement shared with ADWEEK that it employs “advanced AI to consolidate and then optimize diverse signals, including alternative IDs, first-party data, contextual inputs and browser-based tools like the Privacy Sandbox.”
Criteo isn’t alone in its position. Audigent, an identity platform, invested “several million dollars” into Privacy Sandbox, the company’s CEO Drew Stein confirmed to Reuters last September. It represents a major bet, as the company’s annual revenue hovers around $150 million.
Other adtech players including NextRoll, Index Exchange, and RTB House have publicly commented on their commitments to testing Privacy Sandbox solutions.
Now, these firms may be tallying the sunk costs.
“The reactions I hear in private are [full of] fury,” said Paparo. “The anger among the people who have spent time on this is pretty intense.”
NextRoll, for its part, stands by its approach. “While we have invested heavily in the Privacy Sandbox, those efforts were not made for optics, but for impact,” Andrew Pascoe, NextRoll’s vp of data science engineering told ADWEEK. “Consumers continue to demand greater transparency and control over their data, and we remain committed to advancing privacy-first solutions, regardless of the status of third-party cookies.”
RTB House took a similar position. “We remain committed to operating with customers to strengthen campaigns across any environment, cookied or otherwise,” said Michael Lamb, chief commercial officer, in a statement. “This update does not change RTB House’s commitment to user privacy.”
Index Exchange’s svp of product, Michael McNeeley, noted that “this moment reinforces what we already know: change is the only constant” in the adtech industry. “Some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, and a lot of it falls into the unknown,” he told ADWEEK. “We see this as a reminder that the future of privacy in advertising won’t be shaped by any one solution—or any one company.”
Nonetheless, these companies have largely avoided putting all their eggs in the Privacy Sandbox basket, and therefore are insulated from what could have been a potentially worse outcome.
Criteo’s stock surged on the heels of Google’s announcement Tuesday.
The Losers
Google itself may be a loser in the final count, due to the PR hit incurred in its dramatic backtracking. “This is a huge reputational hit—they just look like fools,” said Paparo. “They wasted four or five years of people’s careers and time, and they didn’t do anything meaningful for privacy. They lost a lot of goodwill. I don’t see a positive here for them.”
Paskalis shared the assessment. “Google’s credibility erodes again, with developers and advertisers questioning its long-term roadmap,” he said.
Google made its cookie U-turn announcement this week amid a smattering of broader PR challenges: the company’s ongoing battle with the U.S. Justice Department over the company’s monopoly power in online search—and the fallout from a separate antitrust ruling last week that found the company guilty of operating an illegal monopoly in adtech. Some adland insiders have questioned whether the timing was strategic.
Google declined a request for comment.
Privacy advocates
Among the biggest losers will be privacy advocates, who’ve long argued for a shift away from deterministic tools for advertising and supported consent-based frameworks for online tracking.
“Google’s decision to keep third-party cookies around a bit longer is a step back for privacy and equity,” said Josh Walsh, CEO and cofounder of BranchLab, a privacy-focused healthcare advertising company. “This moment should be a wake-up call to rethink how we define addressability. There are privacy-conscious, data-responsible ways to reach broad and representative audiences that don’t depend on IDs to work. That shift is already underway, and it’s important we don’t lose momentum.”
Consumers
Consumers, at the end of the day, will lose enhanced privacy protections that Google has been promising for years.
“For consumers, we could be shifting to a better advertising system faster,” said Ana Milicevic, cofounder at Sparrow Advisers.
Still, some experts are betting that the tide of privacy will rise in both the regulatory sphere and the digital media ecosystem.
“The privacy environment can only get more restrictive,” said Eric Seufert, a leading media strategist, adding that he sees the industry moving away from deterministic IDs. “Even if third-party cookies aren’t going anywhere on Chrome, the marketing ecosystem is evolving away from deterministic identity.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Raptive’s Bannister. “The third-party cookie’s days,” he said, “are still numbered.”
Update 4/24 at 4:22pm ET: This story has been updated to include a statement from Magnite’s Garrett McGrath.
